


Hollow

by heinous_machinations



Series: Beautiful Monsters [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alpha kids - Freeform, Body Horror, Gore, Heinoustuck - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, Illness, M/M, Mutilation, botched use of medical jargon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-29
Updated: 2014-09-29
Packaged: 2018-02-19 07:14:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2379554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heinous_machinations/pseuds/heinous_machinations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he wakes, there's hollowness first.</p>
<p>Then...nothing.<br/>---</p>
<p>Hollow, or "You Can't Die, So Get to Living."</p>
<p>---</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hollow

When he wakes, there's hollowness first.

Then there's pain.

Searing pain that lined his orbital, mandible, from clavicle to rib, pectoral to waist. It laced about his legs like coils of hot wires, leaving only agony to fill his time. He doesn't know how much passes. He can't see anything. But it's a forced lack of sight. He can tell there's light behind his eyelid, but he can't figure how to open it. It feels heavy and stiff, as does his jaw, his limbs. He feels sedated.

He must be, his subdued mind registers distantly, as he picks up on a faint, repetative beeping echoing softly wherever he is. Must be a hospital. Was there an accident? Is that why he was in so much pain? Maybe he was coming out of surgery, coming off of anesthetic. Why it hurt, but he couldn't move.

But then he hears someone enter. Somebody sighs, "It's been a long four days."

Somebody laudes, "It's was a challenge. Very unique design."

Somebody muses, "It's the final touch."

Somebody asks, "Would you like to do the honors?"

There's a faint rustling of feathers, a sharp sting as his parietal is pierced, then he's asleep again.

\---

When he wakes, there's hollowness first.

Then...nothing.

He doesn't feel a thing. Not tired. Not hungry. Not hurt, or dizzy, or nauseous.

He doesn't feel the stitches that connect his disassembled body. He doesnt feel the loose hinge that is his mandible. He doesnt feel the glasses screwed into his face or the felt gloves sewn into his wrists. He feels absolutely nothing.

He still can't move. He still can't see. There's nothing around to hear.

And as time passes he finds he almost misses the pain.

\---

When he wakes, there's still nothingness.

His brother comes in, the sound of feathers and footsteps following, and while he cannot see his features he can listen as Dave recants all that happened. In his hollow voice he describes with vivid detail each little nuance of his younger sibling's transmutation; cutting nerves, draining blood, removing organs. Several words stuck out in his deadened mind. Extraction. Fluorocarbon. Vivisection. They were such pretty words. He could barely recall what they meant. They sounded nice, however. He listened intently as his brother spared no detail, happy to have the company for once. There wasn't much else to fill his days, no sense of time or direction. He felt suspended when he was alone, completely alone with his thoughts, however scrambled they were, his mind struggling to recall what it was like before this, if there ever was one.

"You know, Dirk. I can never tell when you're awake or asleep," Dave mused with a soft caw.  
\---

There is still nothingness.

It's been a few weeks since Dirk's thirteenth birthday. His thougths have since recollected themselves, and he begins to slowly recall what it was like before he was whatever he was. He remembers pale skin and orange irises, white hair and a smart mouth. He remembers running and moving, his hands aching to build and create, to assemble. His legs yearn to run. But he's still sedentary, no way to know how to move with such complete analgesia. Moreover, he isn't sure he wants to move with such a dismal quality of life. He imagines what he looked like before: a youthful, round face with the makings of an angled jaw. Long nose. Round eyes. Thin mouth. Freckles, splattered across his skin like a spray of paint. Or blood.

He doesn't want to know what he looks like now.  
\---

Nobody has an explanation for his sedated state.

Dave calls every professional in the book, getting the same answer again and again: He should be up and moving by now. It's been two months.

He wonders if the procedure was botched. It couldn't have been. The scientists had done thousands of transmutations.

  
\---

When he wakes, there is still nothingness.

Yet something isn't the same.

He's gotten good at sensing when somebody else is in the room. Roxy used to come and sit, her tendrils winding about Dirk's hand; silent, persistant, distorted sobbing and incomprehensibly drunken babble filled his ears for hours. He wondered distantly what drove her to drink. Then he remembered what she must look like. What she must be. What he and all of his friends were. If he ever regained movement, he might ask Roxy to share a drink. If it would affect him. No lower intestine, no way to absorb its absolving effect.

Jane only came once. Dirk recalled they way they fought tooth and nail a few days before his birthday, how she swore up and down that transmutation was "not that bad." "A good thing." "Made you feel closer to your guardian...you were what they wanted you to be." She complimented his appearance when she saw him, her footsteps laden with the heavy solid gold weapon piercing her torso. Told him he looked wonderful, that Dave chose a fantastic design. But she mistook his silence as malice, unable to know that he was still for over a year, her once soft voice now tainted and morphed, wavering and harsh as her words failed her: she broke down in tears; apologized, again and again, and he found that he, of all things, wanted to let her know that his paralysis was not voluntary, that all was well, and moreover that she was forgiven.

But then there was Jake. Dirk heard the uneven beat of his limp before he even reached his room. One leg had been miscalculated due to his grandmother's lack of dexterity when it came to drawing, magnified by her ignorance to which hand of many was her dominant one. His skulltop hummed eerily in the silence, the door shutting softly. A beat, and then: "Well. Aren't you a sight for sore eyes, Strider."

Where he would have felt joy at his voice before was replaced with that pervasive hollowness. Jake's lighthearted tone was pervaded by the rawness of his voice, as if he spent the night before screaming his head off. It had sounded like that since his transmutation, however; it was well known that transmuted bodies never healed. Most of their voices were a result of the lack of anesthetic throughout the procedure. Funny how we have the right to know what's happening to our bodies, he thought, but no choice over what happens to them.

"Janey pestered me the other day," he explained. "I understand why talking to her wouldn't be high on your list of priorities."

Dirk could only listen, unresponsive. "Look, mate," Jake tried. "I get that you might not be exactly...happy. About the whole thing. No use dragging your heels about it. You can't die, so you might as well get to living!"

Silence. Jake's blackened lips curled into a sneer. "Dietrich Bane Strider, your darned cold shoulder will in no way deter me, so you might as well realize that I am just as persistant now as I was before this whole mess. We aren't children anymore so quit acting like it, gosh darn it!"

He watched from behind the screen of his skulltop as not a muscle twitched in Dirk's body.

"Wait...could it possibly be that your brother had you paralyzed?" Astonishment laced his voice.

At this point, even Dirk didn't know.  
\---

When he wakes, there isn't quite nothingness. There is also Jake.

His word of persistance rang true. He was back the next day, still smelling of scorched skin and decaying foliage, still in love with nature even after it withered, the clouds having effectively smothered all things bright and beautiful. But he was undeterred by that, and he was undeterred by Dirk's silence. He continued to return day after day, always bearing jovial greetings and jokes aplenty. Dirk came to appreciate his presence, giving him something to do every day, something to focus on in his dark, sedated world. He imagined as Jake described in vivid detail the world as it was now, how he supposed transmutation would soon be a necessary evil considering the lack of sunlight lead to the lack of oxygen. How soon children would be transmuted, if only to prevent them from dying too early. Unintentionally, anyways.

And even though this talk was grim, it was more than nothing, which was all he could hope for.  
\---

"I'm going to try something, old chap," Jake warned one morning after his arrival. "I've been talking to your brother, and, though my noggin is a bit unreliable, I think I might have figured something out," he sat on the edge of Dirk's bed-his home for two years-and placed a hand over Dirk's eye. Jake's dark fingertips grazed over the smooth, cold flesh of Dirk's face, the faint scent of embalming fluid pervading his skin, the chemicals cloying and bitter, even to Jake's damaged olfactory senses. His fingers brushed over Dirk's eyelid. "You can't feel that at all, can you?"

Then, he coaxed Dirk's eye open.

The light hit him first. The brightness was overwhelming, but painless. His long neglected iris contracted to a pinprick, and he could finally take in his surroundings. The white ceiling overhead. The pale orange walls. The posters tacked up, torn and stained. His eye reflexively jerked about, drawn by the new stimulus, and with a start, Dirk realized that he could, in a way, feel it moving about. It was nothing like what he had experienced before, yet it was something. His eye found Jake's features, shattered white teeth a stark contrast to his pitch black lips pulled into a smile-more of a grimace really. But it was visible.

And that was more than he could hope for.  
\---

When he wakes, there is light. Well, as light as the overcast world he inhabited could get. There was color, too. There was also Jake.

"I think that your issue is, bucko, is that you don't know what to move! 'Cause you can't feel it? But you're smart. And I'm mobile. We can figure this out, I'm sure!"

So he propped Dirk up against the headboard, grabbed a hand mirror, and sat before him for hours, slowly teaching him to blink.   
\---

When he wakes, his eye flit open. The other was still concealed behind his shattered shades, screwed into his face. He slowly unhinged his jaw, and with great difficulty closed it again, hearing it clack hollowly against his maxilla. He repeated this several times before Jake, as always, entered his room. He never bothered to knock anymore. Dirk always knew who it was.

"Look at you! Managing on your own. Go on, then! Give it a go."

Dirk blinked his assent and slowly opened and closed his mouth twice in succession, bringing a grin to Jake's charred face. "There you are! Right on you, love. Now, your birthday is coming up-" he began.

His birthday. It had been three years since he was made into this marionette. He didn't want to think about the fact that he would be sixteen soon. He didn't like thinking about himself at all. Detested it, really. The hours spent gazing into a mirror as he learned to move was already agony.

"-And I was thinking, why not celebrate? It is your sixteenth, after all. Big day, is it not?"

He blinked three times. No.

"Nonsense, Dirky. You have your newfound abilities, why not put them to use? We'll have a party of sorts."

He blinked no several times in rapid succession.

"Dietrich, Roxy and Janey are dying to see you! Come now, it'll be the bee's knees."

He would have frowned if he could. Instead he rolled his eye.

"Good! It's decided then," Jake grinned, his lips so raw and charred they bled at his smile, the bright red fluorocarbon emulsion staining his dark skin.   
\---

When he woke, there was a birthday banner hanging across his wall.

Curling, bangle-adorned tendrils drew his eyes to Roxy, her platinum white hair curled, styled around the protrusions in her ashen skin, wearing a specially modified dress to suit her tentacles alongside her body. Jane donned a red and white polka-dotted dress, even chanigng her glasses to suit the carmine of her gown. Jake exchanged his smoldering Cairo overcoat for a simple suit jacket and bowtie, hiding the gunshot wounds in his torso.

They looked nothing like they did before. They were pervaded, destroyed, reconstructed, mutilated. Roxy's pale face and golden hair no longer existed. Jane's dark skin and gorgeous grin wasn't there. Jake's warm green eyes and freckle dotted skin had all but disappeared. His own features were eradicated, stitched and sewn and stained, but just for a moment, Dirk couldn't see the mutations, the charred skin, the twisted, pierced bodies, the blood or the gore. He could only see his friends.

And yes, they were no longer beautiful. They were monsters. But Hell. They were his. It was all he could dream.  
\---

"Here we go, Di-Stri," Roxy crooned as her prehensile tendrils wrapped about the ropes that held him up as he learned to walk again.

His muscles had atrophied in the time he spent still, unused due to lack of knowledge how to. But his friends helped (See: forced) him into slowly rebuilding the lost tissue, slowly gaining enough strength to move. Now he was suspended from a pulley system that had allowed him to learn to control his limbs, nearly to be cut down.

Roxy's tendrils sliced through the first rope, releasing Dirk's arm. He slowly but surely lifted it, elicting a chorus of distorted gasps from the trio watching. Another limb, mobile. A minute later, standing for the first time in years. And subsequently, falling, a loud crack resounding as his head hit his bedside stand, splitting his skull with ease, the dyed iron substitute staining his skin. A collective breath was drawn, and then:

"I think it's time for a break," Dirk croaked softly, mechanically, laughing along with his friends.  
\---

When he woke, there was Jake, there to greet him with an idea: Surprise Roxy by walking in on her birthday.

Invigorated and incensed by his memory of his party previous, he agreed.. Dirk managed to walk from the bed to the door, turning the doorknob a few times to get a feel of his hands. To the window, with great difficulty prying it open, feeling the cold breeze on his skin, stirring something inside of him. And in his excitement, an overzealous surge of energy, he turned too quickly.

In the next moment, the world from beneath him spun.

In the next moment, the ground was closer than it should have been, and he was cursing his stupidity, his eagerness over what would fail.

In the next moment, there were arms to stop his fall.

In the next moment, there was Dirk's face buried into Jake's bullet riddled chest, smelling of sulfur and soot and decay, a scent he had come to associate with that vague shred of recollection he had of happiness. Jake steadied him, taking his arm as they walked to the bed, sitting down.

Dirk searched his featureless face for a brief moment before his gloved hands came to rest on either side of Jake's skulltop, feeble hands tugging at the shell. Jake's clawed hands rested over his and pulled. The skulltop peeled from his head with a sickening suction, falling away onto Dirk's bed. Jake ran a claw through his hair, sticky and matted with leaked intracranial fluids drawn from the large fracture in his skull. His forehead was dyed a sickly auburn from since dried blood and fluid, face blackened and charred from severe burns. A large chunk of his skull was missing to reveal his temporal lobe, a good half of his ear gone as well, plastered to the inside of the skulltop. His mouth curled back into his mutilated smile, the sheer white blinding against the dark skin, his irises, too, surrounding his forest green eyes, a color that had long gone extinct.

A color that didn't exist in nature, that had vanished from the grey grass, the dead trees, the black ocean.

Jake reached over, grabbing a screwdriver from the table and steadily unscrewing the shattered glasses from Dirk's face. He pulled them away to reveal his bright orange irises.

A color that didn't exist in nature, too. That had vanished from the bright poppies, the monarchs' wings, the setting sun.

If he had lacrimal glands, Dirk could have cried. Instead, he let himself fall into Jake's arms once more, swearing he could feel it as Jake's lips pressed against his gashed forehead.   
\---

When he woke, there wasn't anything close to nothing.

There was Jake, a clawed arm around his shoulders.

There was Roxy, tendrils curling about his wrist and arm.

There was Jane, head on Roxy's shoulder, a horn stroked by one of her tentacles.

There was light from the television, playing a movie where the grass was as green as Jake's eyes, the sky as blue as Jane's, flowers as pink as Roxy's, and sunsets as orange as Dirk's.

There was noise and sound, of music and laughter and banter. Distorted voices filling the air, Jake's growl, Roxy's hiccups, Jane's waver, Dirk's static.

There was feeling. Faint, but the pressure, the comfort, the warmth in spite of the cold.

There was scent. Of birthday cake and alcohol. Of decay and rot. Of formaldehyde and sea salt. Of ink and hair spray.

There was even taste. His brother had been merciful enough to allow that sense to remain. Bitter liquor as he shared that drink with Roxy. Cloyingly sweet cake that Jane spend the night on. The soot of Jake's burned lips and radiant smiles.

And he falls asleep there.  
\---

When he wakes, there is hollowness first.

Then...nothing.

No pain. No words. No light. Nothing.

Then he hears someone enter. Somebody sighs, "Oww, I slept at a terrible angle."

Somebody laudes, "That cake was amazing, though."

Somebody muses, "He's still asleep?"

Somebody asks, "Would you like to do the honors?"

And then there's a rustling of fabric, and a sharp slap as he's struck playfully with a pillow, orange eyes opening to narrow at the grinning, mischevious monsters standing over him, dyed in their colors. Roxy's silky pink, hole-riddled nightgown that allowed her tentacles through. Jane's bright blue bra and striped pajama shorts that revealed her curvaceous, pierced grey torso. Jake's deep green tee and black boxers, skulltop nowhere in sight.

And fuck what he had thought before.

They were all beautiful. They were all monsters.

They were beautiful monsters. And they were his.

And that was all in four years that he could ever dream.

 ---

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> My first solo Homestuck fanficiton! 
> 
> In a bout of insomnia I sat down and read the entirety of Henioustuck in under half an hour. Fell in love with Dave and, subsequently, Dirk, and decided-Hell. I don't see the Heinous Alphas getting much love! So, je te presente Hollow. 
> 
> If you have any questions, comments, etc., feel free to leave them below!
> 
> A hundred thanks for reading, loves!~
> 
> -Annemarie


End file.
